Michael Heffernan-The Politics of the Map in the Early Twentieth Century

8/14/2019 Michael Heffernan-The Politics of the Map in the Early Twentieth Century

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The Politics of the Mapin the Early Twentieth Century

Michael Heffernan

ABSTRACT:Drawing on material from several countries, principally Britain, France, and the UnitedStates, this paper considers the politics of mapmaking in the years before, during, and immediatelyafter World War I. Following a discussion of some noteworthy but hitherto overlooked mapping proj-ects from the period around 1900, the paper examines the wartime production of maps as aids togeopolitical strategy in three Allied citiesLondon, Paris, and New Yorkwith particular referenceto the major geographical societies in these locations.

KEYWORDS: Geopolitical maps, international relations, early twentieth century, World War I

Introduction

This essay is about the politics of the map inthe opening years of the twentieth century.It does not pretend to provide a compre-

hensive review of mapmaking in this period butconsiders instead the map as a geopolitical arte-fact; as an image of political space, both actual andpotential; and as a military and strategic devicethat both reflected and challenged the objectivesof the major nation-states at a symbolically signifi-cant historical juncture widely perceived as mark-ing the end of a long era of European expansion.The paper is primarily concerned with the politi-cal uses (and abuses) of the map and consequently

has little to say about the technical developmentsin mapping and survey in this period. Nor doesit review the existing research on the history ofmilitary mapping before and during World War I(for example, Chasseaud 1991; 1998). I intend tore-examine, in this early twentieth-century context,the themes considered by other scholars who havediscussed the politics of cartography in other peri-ods, including those researchers responsible forthe impressive body of literature on geopoliticalmapping before and during World War II (see, forexample, Atkinson 1995; Balchin 1987; Godlewska1999; Harris 1997; Herb 1997; Korinman 1990;

Kost 1988; Murphy 1997). Following an openingexploration of the relationship between maps andpolitics at the dawn of the twentieth century, theessay focuses on some hitherto unexamined map-making agencies established during World War I in

Michael Heffernan is professor of Historical Geography, University

of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, U.K. Tel.:+0115 8466144. E-mail: .

Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2002, pp. 207-226

the major cities of three Allied countries: Britain,France, and the United States.

The Cartography of the Year 1900:

Mapping the Twentieth Century

The rapidly expanding literature on the history ofcartography from the sixteenth to the nineteenthcenturies has demonstrated the importance of themap in the creation and maintenance of nation-alism and imperialism, the core ideologies thatpropelled the European peoples to colonize thenon-European world (see, for recent examples,Black 1997; Brotton 1997; Buisseret 1992; Edney

1997; Harley 2001; Jacob 1992; Jardine 1996;Kain and Baigent 1992; Konvitz 1987). For somecommentators, the passing of the nineteenth cen-tury seemed destined to mark the end of this longera of European empire building. The unexploredand unclaimed blank spaces on the world mapwere rapidly diminishing, or so it seemed, and thesense of global closure prompted an anxiousfin-de-sicle debate about the future of the greatempires whose potential for further developmentnow seemed strictly limited. While the illusion ofplentiful empty space beyond Europe had per-sisted, the rival expansionist powers within Europe

had retained their characteristic imperial confi-dence and arrogance. The closure of the globalimperial system implied not only the eclipse of theimperial age but also the beginning of a new era ofintensifying inter-imperial struggle along bordersthat now straddled the globe (Kearns 1984; 1993).

Through the 1890s and 1900s, worrying proph-esies of global closure came thick and fast. In theUnited States, historian Frederick Jackson Turner


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delivered a famous lecture about the consequencesof the closure of American frontier settlement inthe west during the Chicago Exposition of 1893, aspectacular event designed to commemorate thequatercentenary of the Columbian encounter (Turner1998; Bogue 1998). The creation of a transconti-nental America (Meinig 1999) was hugely gratifying,claimed Turner, but this presupposed the need for

a new national project that could shape and inspireAmerican identity in the future, just as the processof westward expansion had done in the past. If itwas to consolidate its new-found power, the UnitedStates might need to seek out new frontiers beyondthe American homeland.

Just over a decade later, the British geographer andConservative politician Halford Mackinder developeda similar theme in a widely debated 1904 lecture tothe Royal Geographical Society. Mackinder foresawthe ending of what he called the Columbian ageof European maritime expansion. This would beaccompanied by an eclipse of the old sea-faringimperial nations and the emergence instead ofhuge land-based empires, bound together by rail-ways, the most important of which would arise inthe heart of the Eurasian landmass. This region was,Mackinder argued, the geographical pivot of history(Mackinder 1904; see also Blouet 1987; Heffernan1998, pp. 63-71; Tuathail 1996, pp. 75-110). ForMackinder, these changes were deeply troubling. Inhis view, Britains future prosperity depended onrecognizing and responding quickly to this emerginggeographical reality (Mackinder 1919).

These anxious visions of a twentieth-century

future were by no means idle speculations. Theyreflected, and were informed by, real economicand geopolitical changes. Between around 1890and the outbreak of World War I, the world systemunderwent a profound transformation as the energybase of industrial capitalism shifted from coal andsteam to oil, gas, and electricity. The economies inthe vanguard of this transitionthe United Statesand Germanywere poised to dominate the worldeconomy but whereas the former had alreadyestablished itself as a continental-scale state, thelatter remained hemmed in by relatively decliningpowers and by the old, nineteenth-century system of

European alliances. Germanys pitch for Europeanhegemony, the principal cause of World War I, canbe viewed as an attempt to break free of these con-straints and acquire American levels of geopoliticaland economic resources.

The rapid rise of Germany, and its bid for Europeansupremacy after 1890, generated a surge of com-petitive nationalism, a kind of geopolitical panicthat transformed and destabilized the European and

global orders. This was characterized by an intensify-ing economic nationalism that steadily underminedthe liberal, nineteenth-century ideals of free trade;by a re-invigorated and often expensive clamor forthe last remaining colonial territories; and by afundamental re-ordering of the European systemof alliances that was to lock first Russia and thenBritain into an increasingly unstable arrangement

designed to encircle and limit German expansion-ism. This final development produced a dangerousbipolar system of European alliances in which a tripleentente of Britain, France, and Russia surrounded acentral European triple alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The system was made all themore unstable by a massive expansion in militaryexpenditure. Between 1880 and 1914, the size ofthe major European armies rose by an average of 73percent and the European warship tonnage increasedby a factor of four (Kennedy 1988, pp. 249-354).

Military re-organization was associated with a sub-stantial expansion in official intelligence gathering.This in turn inspired an increase in the volume ofofficial map production through existing and newlycreated cartographic agencies (see, on the Britishexperience, Stoddart 1992). These organizations,including the Geographical Section of the GeneralStaff (GSGS) in the British War Office and the ServiceGographique de lArme (SGA) in the FrenchMinistre de la Guerre, operated alongside the oldercivilian and commercial mapmaking organizationsand produced a mass of new cartographic material,much of it unseen by the public at large. The volumeand nature of this production still awaits detailed

historical analysis, as do the agencies themselves,and it is beyond the scope of this essay to attemptsuch a review (see, however, Lvy 1926; Ministre dela Dfense Nationale et de la Guerre 1938; ServiceGographique de lArme 1936, on the French orga-nizations). Suffice it to say that rising internationaltension in the years before World War I generateda range of new official cartography in each majornation-state, alongside the ever increasing volumeof commercially available material.

This fact carried obvious implications both forcartographers and for those who sought to influencethe political conditions within and between rival

nation-states at the dawn of the twentieth century. Themap, it would seem, not only reflected geopoliticalcircumstances; if carefully and intelligently created,the map might also help to shape these conditions.Two contrasting but equally ill-fated maps from theperiod around 1900 serve to illustrate these remarks:first, by demonstrating how maps were imagined asboth products and potential harbingers of geopoliti-cal change; and second, by revealing how a maps


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reception and impact reflected changing politicalconditions.

Geopolitical Ideals and Utopian

Cartography: The International

Map of the World

Our first example concerns the remarkable, ifultimately doomed, attempt to produce an inter-national map of the world at the 1:1 million scale.This project was first mooted in 1891 by the lead-ing German geographer Albrecht Penck, then atthe University of Vienna. At the Fifth InternationalGeographical Congress in Berne, Penck arguedthat a new world map should be developed jointly by the mapmaking agencies of the majorpowers (Penck 1892; 1893). The IMW (as it was

subsequently termed) should be constructed atthe million scale, he suggested, based on commonconventions and symbols and with place namesexpressed in the official languages spoken bythe populations represented on each sheet.Developing the same global closure theme thatMackinder would later develop, Penck insistedthat the end of the nineteenth century marked theperfect time to begin such an ambitious, collabora-tive project. The exploration of the worlds land

masses was virtually complete, he claimed, andonly the secrets of the polar regions, the highestmountain ranges, and the more forbidding con-tinental interiors remained to be uncovered. Theopening up of the non-European world in thecenturies since Columbus had been carried out bygeographers working for competing nation-states,but the challenge in the new century would be todraw this information together for the good of allhumanity. What better way to start than with a newinternational map of the worlda fitting summa-tion of, and tribute to, the preceding four centu-ries of selfless, heroic, and often deadly scientificexploration? Such a map couldand shouldbeused in every country of the world, argued Penck.Based on this solid cartographic foundation, a new,twentieth-century geography could emerge to asknew and more complex questions about the natu-

ral world and its human inhabitants. The explicitobjective was to challenge the assumption thatcartography was an inherently national or impe-rial activity undertaken by, and for, specific nation-states to facilitate and affirm territorial ambitions.

The Berne Congress agreed that an investigativecommission should be established, but little wasachieved, despite further supportive resolutionsat the International Geographical Congresses inLondon in 1895, in Berlin in 1899, in the United

Figure 1.The delegates at the Second International Conference on the International World Map, Paris 1913 (Albrecht Penckis the tall figure in the center of the front row). [Source: Royal Geographical Society Archives, London.]


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champion, to abandon his pre-war internationalismin favor of a much more conservative preoccupa-tion after 1918 with the injustices of the VersaillesTreaty and its pernicious impact on Germany (see,for example, Penck 1915; 1916, and more generallyMehmel 1995). But 1918 did not mark the defini-

tive end of the 1:1 million international map, forthe project continued, in an attenuated form, underBritish direction in the Ordnance Survey throughthe inter-war years before being revived again after

World War II under the auspices of the United Nations(MacLeod 1926; United Nations 1953; Gardiner1961; Crone 1962; Winchester 1995).

Geopolitical Realities andSymbolic Cartography: A Tsarist

Map of France

If the fate of the 1:1 million map reveals the limitsof internationalism in the years before 1914, oursecond example reflects the enduring power ofthe more traditional forms of nationalist powerpolitics that would ultimately lead to the outbreak

States in 1904, and in Geneva in 1908 (seethe resolutions by Penck, Franz Schrader,E.H. Hills, and others in InternationalGeographical Congress 1896, pp. 365-70, 781-82; International GeographicalCongress 1901, vol. 1, pp. 208-29; vol. 2,pp. 65-71; International GeographicalCongress 1905, pp. 95-102, 104-7, 553-

70; International Geographical Congress1909-11, vol. 1, pp. 331-35, 388-400;vol. 2, pp. 52-53; see also Robic 1996). An inaugural conference was finallyorganized to establish a properly con-stituted International Map Committeeat the British Foreign Office in Londonin November 1909, and the committeeproduced an outline initial agreement.Preliminary work on a selection of newEuropean 1:1 million sheets began, usingexisting national maps at varying scales.

A mere six provisional sheets had beencompiled by 1913, including a numberconstructed by British cartographers fromthe Ordnance Survey working under thesupervision of then Director-General,Charles Close.1

Unfortunately, several of these sheetswere rejected by different national agenciesas inaccurate, and following another high-soundingresolution at the Tenth International GeographicalCongress in Rome in 1913, a second conferencewas organized in Paris later that year by GnralBourgeois, chief of the Service Gographique de

lArme, in an attempt to accelerate the work (seecommentaries by Penck and others in InternationalGeographical Congress 1915, vol. 1, pp. 5-65, 111-15). The Paris conference was attended by over 80delegatespoliticians, diplomats, civil servants, aswell as cartographers and geographersfrom 34countries (Figure 1). Unfortunately, their delib-erations were undermined by the decision of theUnited States to withdraw from the project in orderto develop its own, national scheme (overseen bythe American Geographical Society) to develop a1:1 million map of Hispanic America unfettered byinternational agreements.2

The outbreak of war in 1914 effectively destroyedthe International Map as originally proposed, its fatesealed by the national rivalries that it had been initi-ated to overcome. The bitterness created by the warled even Penck, the schemes indefatigable original

Figure 2. A Russian map of France, presented to the French Governmentduring the Exposition Universelle Internationale, 1900. [Source: Muse duChteau de Compigne, Compigne (photograph by R.M.N. Arnaudet).]

1 Archives of the Royal Geographical Society, London1:1 Million Map: Miscellaneous Correspondence, 1913-14.2 The resulting American map, which was finished in 1946, was described by Lord Rennell of Rodd, the President of the Royal Geographical

Society at the time, as the greatest map ever produced of any one area. Quoted in Bowman (1948, p. 143); see also Anon. (1946),Wright (1952, pp. 300-319).


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of war. The second map, now virtually forgotten,is an extraordinary artefact, as exquisitely beauti-ful as it was geopolitically portentous. It was pro-duced, by order of Tsar Nicholas II, in the imperialRussian Gemstones (Russkiye Samotsveti) factoryin Ekaterinburg, in the Urals, at the very endof the nineteenth century. It takes the form of aone-meter square map of France, placed within

a magnificent carved wooden encasement, threemeters high and half a meter deep (Figure 2). Onthis sumptuous map, the ocean, the seas, and eachFrench dpartement are carved from highly pol-ished marbles, granites, and semi-precious stones,all hewn from mines in the Urals. Some 106 townsand cities are identified with gold lettering andmarked by different precious and semi-preciousgemstones, also mined in the same region. Themajor rivers are fashioned from sinuous curvesof platinum (750 cm in total) that snake their wayexpensively across the maps surface.3

This amazing object was preparedbased oncartographic information sent to Ekaterinburg bythe Service Gographique de lArme via diplomaticchannels in the Russian Embassy in Paris and theRussian Foreign Ministry in St. Petersburgby sev-eral workers operating under the supervision of V.

V. Mostovenko, the imperial factorys master crafts-man. The map took over two years to produce andwas transported to Paris early in 1900 where it wasformally presented to the President of the FrenchRepublic, mile Loubet, by the Russian Ambassadorto France, Prince P. L. Ourousoff, to mark the open-ing of the Exposition Universelle Internationale in

April of that year.4

The 1900 Exposition was the most ambitiousEuropean event of its kind and was consciouslydesigned to welcome the new century on an evenmore lavish scale than Chicago had celebratedthe Columbian encounter seven years earlier (seePicard 1902-1903 and, more recently, Kaiser 1999;Silverman 1989;Mouvement Social 1992; and more

generally, Greenhalgh 1988; Rydell 1984). TheRussian map must have seemed an ideal presen-tation to mark the opening of the Exposition. Anexpensively crafted gift fashioned in eastern Europeand presented for display in western Europe, themap perfectly suited both the Expositions themeof international cooperation and its spectacularlyopulent style. An entirequartier in west-central Paris,

between the Champs lyses and the river Seine,had been completely re-built for the occasion: onthe right bank loomed an immense triple archway,the entrance to the main site, wherein dozens ofhuge, ornately decorated halls had been erected tohouse exhibits from around the world, grouped intoeighteen major classes from agricultural machineryto military hardware. Beyond was the Grand Palais,with its domed roof of steel and glass flanked bybronze chariots originally located in the gardensat Versailles, with the scarcely less magnificent PetitPalais opposite. On the left bank, in the shadow ofthe Eiffel Tower, itself only a decade old, were fur-ther exhibition halls on either side of the Champ deMars, as well as a major new thoroughfare along theriverthe Rue des Nationson which each of themajor powers had erected their national pavilions.Here one found a replica of Capitol Hill, a GermanSchlo (complete with beer garden), an Elizabethanmanor house, and a reconstruction of the Kremlin.

Adjacent to the Eiffel Tower was an enormous globe,designed by the radical geographer Elise Reclusand intended deliberately to underscore the one-world message, on which was displayed signs ofthe zodiac and around which visitors could glide in

chairs suspended from a spiral encasement (Dunbar1974). Linking the right and left banks of the Seinewas the glittering span of the Pont Alexandre III, aspectacular neo-Baroque bridge named in honor ofthe late Tsar, father of Nicholas, who had laid thefoundation stone on his hugely successful visit toParis four years earlier (for a contemporary report,see Daragon and Dolis 1896). The Russian map

3 Precise information about the map is difficult to obtain. The curators in Compigne have no detailed information on the components usedin its construction, but archival and other material (cited below) gives some, as yet unverifiable, information on the stones used. Theexact circumstances in which the map was produced are also unclear. The imperial factory in Ekaterinburg was founded in 1726, one ofseveral established in the newly created garrison outpost during the latter years of Peter the Greats reign as part of the Russian drive toexploit the enormous mineral wealth of the Urals. The factory specialized in the production of expensive products for the Russian aristoc-racy and upper middle classes prior to the Revolution of 1917, and, unlike other workshops that had specialized in luxury products (suchas the Faberg plant in St. Petersburg), the Ekaterinburg plant continued under the Bolsheviks and survived the destruction of World WarII mainly because of its isolated eastern location. It has continued to produce a variety of award-winning jewellery and objets dart since1945. The official pre- and post-revolutionary story of the factory is available, in Russian, on two websites:http://heritage.eunnet.net/lithica/ural/1982/text.htm and http://sch161.eimc.ru/KAMNI/mnu_3_2.htm. The former site contains a brief description of the map athttp://heritage.eunnet.net/lithica/heritage/litos/05/litos5_2/htm. I am grateful to Dominique Moran for her assistance with translatingthese documents.

4 The Ekaterinburg factorys jewellery had received rave reviews at the 1897 Stockholm Exhibition, and this success seems to haveprompted the Tsar to commission the map for the 1900 Exposition in Paris. See http://www.nv.ru/news/37.htm (in Russian).


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of France was exhibited for the duration of theExposition, not in the Russian pavilion on the Ruedes Nations, but in one of the great exhibition hallson the Esplanade des Invalides devoted to IndustriesDivers, where it drew many admiring reports (e.g.,Raffalovitch n.d.; on the Russian exhibits in general,see Commission Impriale de Russie lExpositionUniverselle 1900).

The Paris 1900 Exposition was enormously popu-lar. According to the official report over 50 millionpeople visited the main site and the outlying parksbetween April and November (Picard 1903, vol. 8,p. 182). But, as the more critical observers noted, itshopeful message of international cooperation wasfrequently undermined by displays that seemed tawdry,over-commercialized, and meretricious (Greenhalgh1988). Entrenched national rivalries were never farfrom the surface, despite the stirring internationalrhetoric. Many exhibitseven those specificallydesigned to celebrate the spirit of international

harmonybetrayed more than a hint of nationalchauvinism and self-interest. The Russian map wasa case in point. Though presented as a simple [sic]tribute from the people of Russia to the people ofFrance (Raffalovitch n.d., p. 6) on the occasion ofParisian centennial celebrations, the map was in factdesigned to re-affirm the Franco-Russian allianceand the end of the Bismarckian balance of powerin Europe.

The fateful alliance between liberal, repub-lican France and imperial, autocratic Russia wasan extremely unlikely union, to be sure, and theregular high-level meetings deemed necessary to

sustain this rapprochement involved several absur-dities, including the incongruous sight of Russianimperial troops playing a spirited version of theMarseillaise, the hymn to French republicanism, asthe Tsar stood rigidly to attention. Such problemsof protocol were deemed to be worth it, however,for the real objective was to establish an encirclingalliance against German expansionism, the arrange-ment into which Britain was drawn following thesigning of the Entente Cordiale in 1904 (Andrew1968; Kennan 1984; Sinitsyn 1998). The details ofthe map reflect these larger, anti-German geopo-

litical objectives. Although the eastern provinces of

Alsace and Lorraine, ceded by a defeated Franceto the new German Empire in 1871 following theFranco-Prussian war, are not included within thelavishly colored montage of French national space,the map followed French cartographic custom atthe time by depicting the former, 1870 border as asingle line enclosing the disputed territories within

what was otherwise unidentified and undifferentiated

German space, a subtle but deliberate affirmationof Frenchrevanchism.

The subsequent history of the 1900 Russian mapprovides further confirmation of the complex cul-tural politics that shaped its production and recep-tion. Immediately after the Exposition, the mapwas placed on permanent display in the Louvre, inaccordance with a promise Loubet made in his letterof thanks to the Tsar on April 9, 1900.5 There themap remained until World War I when, following theBolshevik Revolution in 1917, it was discretely (andmysteriously) withdrawn from public view. Following

the revelation in 1926 that the Tsar had been mur-dered by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburgthe verycity in which the map had been produced (a factprominently displayed on the brass plate that wasfirmly set into the maps wooden encasement)theauthorities in the Louvre, on the advice of theMinistre des Affaires trangres, decided that theobject was too controversial to remain in public view.6This decision was motivated, in part, by a desire toprotect the map from harm, but it also reflected thegrowingdtente between France and Germany beforethe latter was invited to join the League of Nationsin 1926. Displaying in the heart of Paris a symbol of

the ill-fated pre-1914 alliance between republicanFrance and imperial Russia was deemed to be lessthan entirely conducive to the first, uncertain stir-rings of Franco-German cooperation. The fact thatthis map also depicted France within its diminishedpre-1918 borders was, to be sure, a further reasonfor its withdrawal from public view.

But the decision to mothball the map in the Louvreraised other problems. The museum authoritiesreceived several letters through the 1920s and early1930s from inquisitive spectators who recalled itsoriginal display, asking about its whereabouts. One

correspondent wondered whether a cash-strapped

5 The letter is available in Loubet s private papers, mostly arranged by year, in the Archives Nationales [AN] 473 AP 7. The correspondenceabout the maps transfer to the Louvre can be found in Archives du Louvre [AL]/M8 (Objets dArt: Dons et legs accepts, 1793-1956.Carte de France (1901)).

6 It should be noted that the first authoritative statement about the circumstances of the Tsars murder by a Russian witness was pub-lished in Paris (Sokolov 1926). The correspondence relating to the withdrawal of the map can be found in AN F21 2277, 4061, 4347, 4490and in AL/U10 (Chteau de Compigne: Dons par ltat), notably the explanatory letter f rom H. Verne (Directeur des Muses Nationauxet de lcole du Louvre) to G. Huisman (Directeur Gnral des Beaux Arts), dated May 20, 1939.


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government had secretly sold the object to raisefunds.7 In 1930, following an intriguing exchangebetween the museum directorate and the govern-ment, it was decided that the map should be quietlyre-located to the small museum in the Chteau deCompigne, the palace to the north-east of Pariswhere Tsar Nicholas had stayed during his brief visitto France in the autumn of 1901. Here it could be

safely displayed away from suspicious metropoli-tan eyes, and here it remains to this day, in a small,rather dusty, and otherwise empty room.8

The international 1:1 million map and the 1900Russian map of France were both casualties of thetroubled era in which they were conceived, thoughtheir poignant fates stem from different causes. Asan avowedly internationalisteven utopianproject,the international map foundered on the rocks ofentrenched national antipathy and suspicion, theforces that were subsequently to drive the Europeanpowers to war in 1914. The fact that this scheme wasnot revived on its original terms after World War Idemonstrates that the internationalism it representedhad not been strengthenedindeed it was probablyweakenedby the terrible events of 1914-1918. The1900 Russian map of France was a symbol of thesesame pre-war national rivalries and intrigues, butit was condemned to languish in a small provincialmuseum as a result of geopolitical upheavals thatflowed directly from the war.

The remaining sections of this essay take us for-ward into the period of World War I to consider howother maps were produced, stored, recycled, anddistributed by hitherto unexamined cartographic

units in three major Allied cities: London, Paris,and New York.

Maps, War, and Empire:

The View from London

On the eve of World War I the largest, privatelyheld map collection in London was maintained bythe Royal Geographical Society (RGS) which, withover 5,300 Fellows, was by far the largest, wealthi-

est, and most successful such society in the world(Heffernan 1996). The ruling Council of the RoyalGeographical Society was a roll-call of Britainsimperial establishment. Thanks largely to theenergetic patronage of Lord Curzon, former Vice-Roy of India and subsequently Foreign Secretary,the Royal Geographical Society had recentlyacquired the palatial buildings in Kensington

Gore that remain its headquarters to this day.This newly refurbished mansion gave the Societya prime location at the very heart of scientificLondon, that overlapping network of Victorianmuseums, research institutes, and learned societiesthat dominated the landscape of Kensington. Theshort walk to the Royal Geographical Society fromthe South Kensington underground railway stationtook the visitor, then as now, past the imposingNatural History Museum, the Science Museum,the Victoria and Albert Museum, Imperial College,plus several major Embassies. This area, more thananywhere else in London, encapsulated the idea ofthe imperial archive, the calculating center ofthe British imperial state where so many of thenations self-consciously imperial scientific institu-tions were located (on these concepts, see Latour1987, pp. 215-57; Richards 1993). If the heart ofthe British Empire was to be found further east inthe echoing corridors of Whitehall or in the finan-cial institutions of the City of London, the brainof empire was located here, in Kensington.

On July 31, 1914, two days before news reachedLondon of the German invasion of Belgium andFrance and four days before Britain declared

war, Curzons successor as President of the RoyalGeographical Society, Douglas Freshfield, placedthe personnel and resources of the Society, includingits impressive map collection, at the disposal of theBritish War Office, in accordance with policy agreeda decade earlier in 1904. From that day until the endof the war, the Royal Geographical Society becamea significant institutional focus of British militaryintelligence. The existing directors, led by successiveSecretaries, Sir John Scott Keltie and Arthur Hinks,and by Freshfields wartime successor as President,

7 AL/U10 (Chateau de Compigne: Dons par ltatLetter from Eugne Dubois (President of the Socit Historique du Raincy) to Albert

Lebrun (President of the French Republic), February 16, 1939. The fact that this letter was sent, by someone who clearly had a personalinterest in the map, some nine years after it had been removed from the Louvre, suggests that its re-location to Compigne took placewith the minimum of publicity. Other letters inquiring about the map can also be consulted in this same dossier.

8 The room in which the Russian map is positioned is not always open to the public, but the museum had staged an exhibition to com-memorate the visit of Tsar Nicholas to Compigne in the autumn of 1901, and although the map had no direct connection with this event,it was incorporated into the exhibition in a rather low-key way. Visitors were ushered through the small, ground-floor room in which themap is located en route to the main exhibition rooms on the first floor, where an expensively assembled display of objects from Frenchand Russian collections relating to the Tsars visit and the Franco-Russian alliance, complete with detailed commentaries, could beviewed. The map is described briefly in the exhibition cataloguesee Muse National du Chteau de Compigne (2001, pp. 20, 124). Iam grateful to the curators at Compigne, particularly Jacques Perot, Jacques Kuhnmunche, and Elisabeth Caude, for their assistance.


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Sir Thomas Holdich, were supplemented by dozensof mainly female secretarial and cartographic staffand by a shadowy group of intelligence officersassociated with both the Geographical Section ofthe General Staff (GSGS) of the War Office andthe Naval Intelligence Department (NID) of the

Admiralty (Anon. 1919).9

The Geographical Section of the General Staffwas the oldest bureau in the expanding network ofinstitutions that made up the British intelligencecommunity (Andrew 1985, p. 259). It was headed byColonel (later Sir) Walter Coote Hedley, whose full-time

staff of twenty-four officers was responsible for theproduction and collation of specialist (and generallysecret) maps for official and military use. In view ofits mapmaking role, the Geographical Section of theGeneral Staff had close relations with the OrdnanceSurvey (OS), the Director of which, Charles (later SirCharles) Close, had been its former chief. Indeed,

the Geographical Section of the General Staff andthe Ordnance Survey effectively fused into a singleoperation between 1914 and 1919 and oversaw theproduction of the estimated 32 million map sheetsfor the British war machine issued during that

9 This section is based on the unpublished correspondence of leading RGS Fellows, particularly Douglas Freshfield, John Scott Keltie,Arthur Hinks, and Thomas H. Holdich, available in files arranged by Fellows name and year, in the RGS archives in London. It alsodraws on the 1:1 million map correspondence, arranged by year in the same archive. The arguments are put forward in greater detail inHeffernan (1996).

Figure 3.The political geography of Africa on the eve of the war, after Harry Johnston. [Source: Johnston, H.H.(1915), Political geography of Africa before and after the War. Geographical Journal45: 273-301 (fold-out seriesof three maps positioned at end of this number of the journal).]


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period (some 21,000 per day), mostly in the form oflarge-scale trench maps (Chasseaud 1991; 1998). Theother intelligence agency that also acquired officesin the Royal Geographical Society was the NavalIntelligence Department, headed by the charismatic

Admiral (later Sir) William Blinker Hall.Lectures by invited academics and dignitaries con-

tinued in the Royal Geographical Society throughoutthe war, and most were published in the GeographicalJournal. Several lecturers, perhaps the majority, con-cerned themselves with various aspects of the war,and a few were openly critical of Britains politicaland military leadership, not least for failing to takeseriously the countrys store of geographical expertise,a theme that became especially prevalent after thedisaster of the 1915 campaign at Gallipoli (RoyalGeographical Society 1917; Hogarth 1915). Some

of these lectures made use of various shock maps,which were often recycled and sometimes ended upin the national and international press. An intriguingexample was the trio of maps produced by Sir Harry

Johnston, the zoologist, explorer, and African colo-nial administrator, to accompany his widely debatedlecture of February 24, 1915. The three maps show

the political geography of Africa as it was on the eveof the war, in July 1914 (Figure 3); the arrangementJohnston predicted if Germany and her allies wereto win the war and impose their colonial demandson the defeated Allies (Figure 4); and, finally, thearrangement Johnston recommended ifor ratherwhenthe Allies won the war (Figure 5).

The evidence on which Johnstons maps were basedwas not made clear in the accompanying text, butthe message they conveyed was clear: German ter-

Figure 4.The predicted political geography of Africa in 1916 had Germany and its allies been victorious in 1914, afterHarry Johnston. [Source: Johnston, H.H. 1915. Political geography of Africa before and after the War. Geographical

Journal45: 273-301 (fold-out series of three maps positioned at end of this number of the journal).]


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ritorial ambitions were global rather than merelyEuropean and, as such, directly compromised Britainsimperial interests in Africa (and elsewhere). Theseimages, and hundreds like them about other partsof the world, are likely to have had a considerableimpact on popular attitudes during the war. Maps

of this kind seem to have circulated widely: theToronto Globe described Johnstons maps on May5, 1915 (p. 2, col. a) as the most important unof-ficial documents that have crossed the Atlantic sincethe beginning of the war.

The accuracy of Johnstons images was, of course,highly debatable. It is most unlikely that his secondmap, showing the dread prospect of a post-war Africawith a great swath of German territory stretchinguninterrupted from east to west across the conti-

nents central tropical zone, reflected agreed policyin Berlin. Germanys territorial demands in Africa,though occasionally invoked in wartime propaganda,were regarded as relatively unimportanta second-order problem, easily resolved once the war waswon. The famous war aims memorandum drawn

up by Chancellor Theobald Bethmann Hollweg inSeptember 1914 certainly contained a reference toa central African empire comprising the existingGerman colonies plus territorial concessions fromthe Allied powers, but this was not a detailed claim,and it appears this part of the documentdrafted byColonial Minister Wilhelm Solf under the erroneousassumption that there were to be no German territo-rial claims in Europewas added as an afterthought(Fischer 1967, pp.102-104, 586-591).

Figure 5.The predicted political geography of Africa in 1916 in the event of an Allied victory, after Harry Johnston.[Source: Johnston, H.H. 1915. Political geography of Africa before and after the War. Geographical Journal45:273-301 (fold-out series of three maps positioned at end of this number of the journal).]


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Vol. 29, No. 3 217

However ill-informed Johnston was about Germanambitions (and a cautious concern for the truth onthat question was probably the last of his concerns),he does appear to have been extremely well briefedabout Allied policy, including its more secret aspects.

A comparison of Johnstons second and third mapsis instructive in this respect. These two images aredramatically different in virtually all respects: the

former shows a cohesive, east-west German Africanempire, while on the latter, German influence iseradicated, and the long-cherished dream of aBritish African empire stretching from the Cape toCairo appears instead (notwithstanding the strategicabsence of British pink from Egypt). But the mostintriguing aspect of the second and third maps is theenhanced Italian presence in North Africa, whichappears on both. At the time Johnston deliveredhis lecture, Italystill part of the pre-war Triple

Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungarywasneutral. His second map predicts, not unreasonably,that even a neutral Italy would be in a sufficientlystrong position to demand a slice of North Africanterritory at the expense of both Britain and France,if the Central Powers were to win the war. Oddly,

Johnstons third map suggests that this arrangementwould also be the most likely outcome in the eventof an Allied victory. This would seem to confirmthat Johnston was well aware of the secret propos-als being hatched in London and Paris at the timeof his lecture to persuade the Italian governmentto enter the war on the Allied side, despite the pre-war alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, inreturn for colonial territorial concessions, principally

in the Ottoman Empire but also in Africa (Hess1963). These were the very proposals subsequentlyaccepted by the Italian government at the Treaty ofLondon, signed on April 26, 1915, as the conditionfor a declaration of war against the Central Powers.They were also, of course, the proposals largelyignored by the British and French governments, tothe dismay of the Italian delegation, at the PeaceConferences in 1919.

As Johnstons African maps were being debated invarious capitals, on both sides of the wartime divide,the cartographic work of the Royal GeographicalSociety continued apace. Following some acrimonious

discussion, in which the Geographical Section of theGeneral Staff and the Naval Intelligence Departmentrevealed their very different agendas, it was agreedthat the Royal Geographical Society should beginofficial map work to complement the mass produc-tion of maps undertaken by the Ordnance Survey.The Society was instructed to produce a new series ofmap sheets, covering Europe and the Middle East atthe 1:1 million scale; in other words, to continue the

work that had begun so hesitantly in the OrdnanceSurvey on the international 1:1 million map beforethe war. If the Royal Geographical Society couldcomplete the European and Middle Eastern sectionsof the international map based on British ratherthan international symbols and conventions, thiswould have significant propaganda value.

Assuming an Allied victory, it was hoped that such a

map could be presented as the legitimate offspringof the original international map. Mass-producedversions of the various sheets could quickly be madeavailable as the base maps for the peace negotiationsthat would follow the war. The explicit objectivewas to ensure that the new political boundaries ofEurope and the Middle East would be shown to anexpectant world on a British map designed andproduced by British cartographers in London, anambition openly discussed in a Times editorial entitled

Geographers and the war (May 18, 1915, p. 2, col.b). To underscore the political impact of the newmap, it was also anticipated that thematically modi-fied versions of individual sheets (showing a rangeof other variables such as ethnicity and language)could also be produced to undermine the claimsof Central Powers and reinforce the legitimacy ofthe Allied geopolitical ideals. Militarily, it was alsohoped (particularly by the intelligence officers inthe Naval Intelligence Department) that the new 1:1 million sheets would be useful strategically in theless effectively mapped Ottoman lands of the MiddleEast (on cartographic innovations in these regions,see Collier 1994; Gavish and Biger 1985).

To some extent, these ambitions were realized. By

the end of the war, ninety 1:1 million map sheets hadbeen produced by the RGS cartographers, coveringthe whole of Europe, the Middle East, and North

Africa. Most had been derived from existing foreignmaps at different scales, but many of the Russianand Ottoman sheets had been based on intelligencereports supplied by British military attachs withthe Tsarist armies in the east or by intelligence offi-cers operating in the Middle East, including T.E.Lawrence, D.G. Hogarth, Gertrude Bell, and W.H.I.Shakespear. The RGS 1:1 million sheets were indeedused as one of the principal base maps for the ParisPeace Conferences in 1919-1920, but their military

importance was minimal. For the most part, the warwas fought along the static quagmire of trenches, atroglodyte world of mass killing that gave a tragicirony to the continental, indeed global, imagina-tion of those laboring over their maps in the RoyalGeographical Society. But such cartographic visionsgave sustenance to those, the so-called Easternersin the British political and military establishment,who had campaigned throughout the war for a more


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assertive non-European, imperial alternative to thedeadlock in Europe, one that would allow Britainsunder-used naval power to be deployed againstthe relatively weak Ottoman Empire. Despite thefailure of the attempt to capture Constantinoplethrough the hell-fire of Gallipoli in 1915, the RoyalGeographical Society (particularly the NID section ofits operation under the direction of D.G. Hogarth)

was a significant metropolitan focus promoting T.E.Lawrences plan for a naval attack on the Middle East,coupled with an Arab Revolt, a campaign that pavedthe way for Britains post-war imperial dominanceof the Middle East (Heffernan 1996).

Maps, War, and Nation:

The View from Paris

The equivalent organization to the RoyalGeographical Society in the French capital was theSocit deGographie de Paris (SGP). Establishedin 1821, nine years earlier than its sister society inLondon, it was nevertheless a much smaller orga-nization with just 2,000 members in 1914, thoughit stood at the center of a much larger Frenchnetwork of geographical societies, with a totalmembership of perhaps 20,000 (Heffernan 1995;Schneider 1990). Like the Royal GeographicalSociety, the Socit de Gographie de Paris wasa distinguished academic-cum-political club thatboasted new headquarters on the Boulevard SaintGermain, on the edge of the Latin Quarter onthe left bank of the Seine, a short walk from the

Sorbonne and the Grandes coles (Fierro 1983;Lejeune 1982).Despite its more modest size, the Socit de

Gographie de Paris was enthusiastically supportedby university academics in Paris, particularly thedistinguished group of regional geographers associ-ated with Paul Vidal de la Blache (Berdoulay 1981,pp. 141-227; Buttimer 1971; Sanguin 1993), andby powerful patrons, led by the Societys President,Prince Roland Bonaparte. The moment war wasdeclared, the societys Secretary, Baron tienneHulot, offered the societys map collection, library,and other resources to the recently restructured

Service Gographique de lArme, directed byGnral Bourgeois (Anon 1918-1919; Lvy 1926;

Ministre de la Dfense Nationale et de la Guerre1938; Service Gographique de lArme 1936).10

Aware of the international renown of French geogra-phers, Bourgeois promptly recruited several of thecountrys leading practitioners (including de la Blache,

Albert Demangeon, Lucien Gallois, Emmanuel deMartonne, and Emmanuel de Margerie) to work on anewCommission de Gographie producing thematic

maps and short reports on the human and physicalgeography of different European regions for use bythe French General Staff (see also Hanna 1996).11One of the stranger aspects of this exercise was thedeadly serious instruction that the Commissionsreports should not include German geographicalexpressions such as hinterland.12

While this work continued, the monthly publicmeetings of the Socit deGographie de Paris were,like those in the Royal Geographical Society, devotedto geographical studies of the war in different partsof the world and were likewise published, completewith dozens of maps, in the societys journal,LaGographie (Hulot 1914-1915). These included lec-tures speculating on the most appropriate politicalgeography of Europe after the war, assuming an

Allied victory. The working assumption was that theAustro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires wouldbe completely dismantled and the German Empiremassively diminished and entirely re-organized(see, for example, Henry 1917; Leger 1914-1915;Lichtenberger 1917). German geographers, includingthose whose researches had been warmly receivedbefore 1914, were roundly criticized as supine agentsof German imperial expansion (Rabot 1917). A semi-

organized campaign was also waged to influence thepolitical opinions of scientists in neutral countries. DeMartonne produced a special leaflet in 1917 detailingthe destruction of cherished historical landscapesunder German military occupation, a text then dis-patched to academics in neutral countries. When aProfessor Hein, from Zurich University, returnedthe leaflet without comment, a furious de Martonnewrote back on April 4, 1917: these outrages requiremore than a shrug of the shoulders... It is Germanythat will carry, for ever, the responsibility for havingunleashed the most appalling conflagration in his-tory... Gott strafe Deutschland!13 In general, French

geographers seemed less willing than their Britishcounterparts to criticize their military and political

10 This section is based on various published and unpublished materials on the Socit de Gographie de Paris, housed in the archives ofthe Socit de Gographie de Paris, Salle des Cartes et Plans, Bibliothque Nationale, Paris [BN-SGP]. For a detailed study of the colonialgeopolitics of the SGP during World War I, see Heffernan (1995) and, more generally, Lejeune (1993).

11 Archives de la Guerre, Chteau de Vincennes, Paris [AG] 9.N.110: Commission de Gographie, Service Gographie de lArme, 1914-19.

12 BN-SGP 9bis/2316Letter to Gnral Bourgeois from Lieutenant-Colonel de Gennes, June 20, 1915.13 BN-SGP 9bis/2316Letter to Professor Hein from Emmanuel de Martonne, April 4, 1915.


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Vol. 29, No. 3 219

establishment, though this possibly reflected the evenmore draconian censorship restrictions imposed inFrance (see, for example, Malterre 1917, an articlein which several paragraphs were supprim parla Censure).

Over a year into the conflict, by which time Francehad lost almost a million men, Aristide Briandbecame the new Prime Minister. A self-styled radi-

cal, Briand rightly understood that public supportfor the war could not be guaranteed. Many on theleft now believed the war had become an end initself rather than a means to an end. The absenceof wider geopolitical objectives or a higher reasonfor continuing the slaughter (beyond the need toremove German forces from French soil) seemed adisturbing problem. At the same time, representa-tives from neutral countries, including the UnitedStates, had begun to call on all countries involvedin the conflict to declare clear war aims that mightat least raise the distant prospect of a negotiatedpeace (Stevenson 1982).

Briand decided to establish a high-level academiccommittee, operating alongside the Commissionde Gographie, to formulate a set of intellectuallycompelling geopolitical objectives that could formthe basis of Frances negotiating position followingan Allied victory. Four separate committees wereestablished in February 1916 to devise Frenchterritorial claims relating to the Franco-Germanborder, central Europe, Africa, and Asia-Oceania.The venue for these weekly committee meetings,which included sixty leading French geographers,historians, economists, geologists, and engineers, was

the headquarters of the Socit deGographie deParis. Again, the SGPs ostensibly independent sci-entific status and close connections to governmentwere crucial considerations, as was its unrivalledmap collection. Briand, who enjoyed the companyof intellectuals, placed his faith firmly in the glitter-ing stars of the French academic firmament in thehope that they would be able to devise a new Frenchvision of Europe and the wider world.

After a year of exhaustive research, in which dozensof reports were produced by full-time members ofthese committees plus co-opted experts, the twonon-European committees produced provisional

reports, complete with dozens of maps, outliningFrench policy for the colonial arena (Heffernan1995). The more important European committees,on the Franco-German border and central Europe,had yet to complete their deliberations and mergedinto a single agency in February 1917, the so-calledComit dtudes. The president of this new committee

was the nearest France had to an official historian,Ernest Lavisse; its vice-president was Paul Vidal dela Blache, Lavisses friend and long-time collabora-tor; and its secretary was Emmanuel de Martonne,de la Blaches student and son-in-law. Work con-tinued throughout the rest of the war, both at theSocit deGographie de Paris and at the Institutde Gographie in the Sorbonne.14

On the eve of the Peace Conferences in early 1919,the Comit published a huge two-volume report,the nearest the French government came to anofficial statement on the future political geogra-phy of Europe (Comit dtudes 1918-1919). Thiswas accompanied by some of the most remarkablemaps produced anywhere during the war, all of whichwere designed to reinforce the French negotiatingposition. There is much that could be written aboutthis remarkable document, but the central point toemphasize here is the overwhelming importanceof the Franco-German border, the single topicconsidered in the first volume. The main objective,which surprised no-one, was to ensure the returnto France of the lost provinces of Alsace andLorraine, plus the economically important area ofthe Saar coal-field: the re-establishment, in otherwords, of the cherished limites naturelles of theFrench hexagon (Heffernan 2001). The provinces of

Alsace and Lorraine were presented in the stronglyLamarckian terms so characteristic of the Vidalianschool; as a kind of social organism ordained bynatural and historical forces to be restored to France(Archer 1993). This, at least, was the public version,though it should be noted that the members of the

Comit dtudes were acutely aware of the hugedifficulties of reintegrating a region that had beensubstantially transformed by almost fifty years ofGerman control. Lest anyone doubt the indisput-able nature of Frances claim to Alsace-Lorraine,the Comits report provided some 500 pages ofdetailed historical, archaeological, architectural,ethnographic, linguistic, economic, and sociologi-cal evidence by way of proof.

The pressure of this Herculean task probably has-tened the demise of Vidal de la Blache, who diedbefore the final report was published, but the workhe undertook while involved with the Comit lives

on in the form of his last, and arguably finest, pieceof writing,La France de lEst (Vidal de la Blache 1917,esp. pp. 1-6). Vidal de la Blaches fellow geographerson the Comit, including de Martonne, de Margerie,Demangeon, Gallois, and Jean Brunhes, were allprominently involved as members of the ServiceGographique Francaise, established to advise

14 BN-SGP 9/2278-82, 2284-2287Comit dtudes: Correspondence.


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French political leaders on geographical questionsduring the Paris Peace Conferences in 1919 and1920, particularly in regard to the borders of thenew states in south-central Europe (see, for example,

Wilkinson 1951; Palsky 2002; and, more generally,Brunhes and Vallaux 1921). The same men wouldalso shape the development of French geographythrough the inter-war years, based in large measure

on their experiences in World War I (Claval 1998pp. 153-294; see, for example, Demangeon andFebvre 1935).

While the Royal Geographical Society acted as ametropolitan node in Britains imperial archive andfocused on the production of maps and the develop-ment of schemes to project the war onto a winnableimperial dimension, the Socit deGographie deParis became a node in Frances national archive, acenter of geographical and cartographic calculationthat reflected a characteristically French faith thatintellectuals from the Sorbonne and the Collge deFrance could devise elegant geographical, historical,and, above all, cartographic arguments about thesovereignty of the national space.

Maps, War, and the New World:

The View from New York

Let us now turn to our third and final center of wartime mapping: the American GeographicalSociety in New York, headquartered at this time insome splendor in a large residence on Broadway,not far from Columbia University. Established

in 1851, the American Geographical Society was younger than both the Socit de Gographiede Paris and the Royal Geographical Society butwas, nevertheless, a thriving and successful orga-nization with over 3,000 members by the summerof 1916. Its success was due in no small measureto its energetic and ambitious young Director,Isaiah Bowman, later President of Johns HopkinsUniversity and an influential foreign policy com-mentator through the inter-war years (see Martin1980; Smith in press; Wright 1952; and, more gen-erally, Schulten 2001, p. 176-203).15

During the early months of the war, the American

Geographical Society continued its work more or lessas normal, but things changed dramatically after theUnited States declared war on Germany in April 1917.While accepting that the war was in every respectcalamitous, President Woodrow Wilson neverthelessbelieved the conflict provided the opportunity for a

fresh start in Europe. Although he had steered theUnited States into the war on the Allied side, Wilsonbelieved that his government could act as an honest,disinterested, and objective arbitrator between rivalEuropean powers. Who better to guide the nations ofthe Old World on the path to peace and justice thatthe U.S., a new nation pledged to make the worldsafe for democracy? The war thus marked Americas

coming of age, claimed Wilson, an opportunity forAmerica to demonstrate to its parent continent anew-found maturity and sophistication (Walworth1976).

Having pressured European leaders into clarifyingtheir war aims, Wilson decided that the United Statesshould establish a far more ambitious and less partisaninvestigation of the worlds geopolitical problems.The Inquiry (or, as it is often mistitled, the HouseInquiry after its largely inactive chairman, ColonelEdward Mandell House) was established in April1917 as a fact-finding, geopolitical think tank. Likethe Comit dtudes, it comprised some of the finestminds in American academia, in the anticipationthat they could conjure up rational solutions to theproblems of the world. Once again, it was decidedto locate this project outside the structures of formalgovernmental agencies, in the belief that informationamassed and conclusions reached by an ostensiblyneutral, disinterested, and scholarly organizationwould have the desired aura of scientific credibility.Originally based in cramped offices in the New YorkPublic Library, the Inquiry moved (following energeticlobbying by Bowman) to the AGS that November, luredby the possibility of using the Societys enormous

map collection. Although Bowman was technicallyonly Chief Territorial Specialist, he quickly becamewhat his co-worker on the Inquiry, Charles Seymour,subsequently President of Yale, called the presidinggenius behind the operation (Seymour 1951, p. 2;see also Gelfand 1963).

The Inquirys objective was the collection of a vastcorpus of historical, economic, environmental, andethnological data, mainly on Europe, which could becondensed into a catalogued, cross-referenced archiveof stark incontrovertible fact, a mobile data bankthat could eventually be shipped across the oceanto Europe, where a post-war Peace Conference was

destined to take place. The display of this materialin map form remained a centralindeed probablythe centralpreoccupation of the Inquiry. WhereEuropeans had traditionally relied on old, partisanarguments, it was hoped that the United States wouldbring clear, indisputable facts to cut through the

15 This section is based on the published records of the American Geographical Society and on unpublished materials in the AGS archivesin New York, particularly the correspondence of Isaiah Bowman (catalogued by correspondent and year). The arguments are put forwardin greater detail in Heffernan (1999).


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Vol. 29, No. 3 221

cant and bad faith that had undermined Europeanagreements in the past. The assumption was thatperfectly rational solutions would logically emergefrom the Inquirys painstakingly acquired informa-tion. As Bowman put it several years later in a letterto a colleague in England:

Where the experts of [other] nations camefully stocked with ideas, they did not havethe mass of information assembled in a flex-ible, workable form. Only the U.S. delegation

has such a resource, and we anticipated thatthis would give us a negotiating advantageeven over the French, in whose capital citythe fate of Europe and the Near East wouldbe decided.16

By the beginning of 1918, a hundred-and-fiftyacademics were working more-or-less full-time onthe Inquiry, organized on a regional basis with aspecialist academic in charge of each area (Table 1).The Inquirys all-important cartographic work wasdirected by Mark Jefferson, assisted by Bowman himselfand Douglas Johnson, Professor of Physiography atColumbia University, who was the official specialiston boundaries. The latter had been a member ofthe American Rights League, which had campaignedfor American military support of the Allies. In thiscapacity, he had penned numerous anti-Germanpamphlets, including a memorable work entitled The

Perilof Prussianism (1917) (see also Johnson 1917a;1918; 1921). The Inquiry also drew on the expertise

of other American geographers with mapmaking experi-ence, including W.M. Davis,

Wallace Atwood, Albert PerryBrigham, and Ellen ChurchillSemple, who all collected dataand wrote briefing documentson different parts of Europe.

Money seemed no object,and materials flooded intothe AGS offices from librariesacross North America and fromLondon and Paris, where thetenacious Johnson spent severalmonths. By the end of the war,the Inquiry had become one ofthe most exhaustive and ambi-tious exercises in geographicaland historical data collectionever attempted.

In view of the Inquirysinductive reasoning, it isperhaps unsurprising that nosingle report or set of recom-

mendations was ever produced, and the materialsso painstaking brought together were subsequentlyreturned to the numerous libraries whence they came.

Wilson and his advisers had hoped that a logicalconclusion would emerge during the negotiationsbased on Americas unique archive of fact. This hugecollection of material, including perhaps the largestsingle shipment of maps ever to cross the Atlantic,was duly despatched to Paris on the USS George

Washington at the end of the war to be carefully re-assembled, supervised by Bowman and the othermembers of the delegation, at the U.S. headquartersin the Htel Crillon on the Place de la Concorde.This was to be the center of New World reason andrationality in Europe, the basis of Americas contri-bution to world peace.

Wilsons policy, ambiguously expressed in hisfamous fourteen points, was wedded to the ideal ofnational self-determination. Despite its studiouslyneutral rhetoric, the Inquiry had to support thatideal. A central objective, therefore, was to identifythose European peoples who had scientifically validclaims to nationhood. The implicit assumption behindthis self-consciously rational geopolitical theorizingwas that American intellectuals could bring to bearunique perspectives, particularly concerning ques-tions of race and language, based on the UnitedStates exceptional experience as an immigrantnation, a melting pot of European peoples. Unlike

16 American Geographical Society Archives, Bowman PapersLetter from Bowman to Frank Debenham, July 12, 1929.

Director S.E. Mezes College of the City of New YorkChief Territorial Specialist Isaiah Bowman American Geographical SocietyRegional Specialists

Franco-German border Charles Haskins Harvard UniversityPoland and Russia R.H. Lord Harvard University

Austria-Hungary Charles Seymour Yale UniversityItaly W.E. Lunt Haverford College

The Balkans Clive Day Yale UniversityWestern Asia W.L. Westermann University of Wisconsin

Far East S.K. Hornbeck United States ArmyColonial problems George L. Beer formerly of Columbia University

Economic Specialist A.A. Young Cornell UniversityLibrarian and Historical Specialist James T. Shotwell Columbia UniversityBoundary Specialist Douglas Johnson Columbia UniversityChief Cartographer Mark Jefferson State Normal School, Ypsilanti

Table 1. The organization of the American Inquiry, 1917-19.

Source: Mezes 1921


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the prevailing polygenesis theories of race that stilldominated in Europe, and which postulated irrecon-cilable racial differences, the American experienceseemed to suggest that race was more a dynamic,environmentally determined concept, susceptible todevelopment, notably through racial intermingling(e.g., Ripley 1899). This, of course, was a centraltenet of liberal, American assimilationism and mightlogically have been used to argue for a United States

of Europe, modeled directly on the United States ofAmerica. While a few optimists argued for preciselythis outcome, this ideal seemed utopian, even to themost ambitious American delegates. The compromise,which served the ideals of national self-determinationwhile underlining the fluidity of racial categories,was the argument, adopted in numerous Inquiryreports and publications, that there were twenty-fiveEuropean peoples who had the right to nationhood

(for a variant on this claim that emphasized languagerather than race, see Dominian 1917, a work com-missioned for the Inquiry by Bowman) (Figure 6). Asanother American author expressed it in 1919:

Twenty-five human groups . . . show suchunity of purpose and ideal, and such commu-nity of interest, of history, and of hopes, andeach in such reasonable numbers, that theyhave embarked or deserve to embark on a

career of nationality (Brigham 1919, p. 219).For most members of the Inquiry, the politicalgeography of Europe should reflect this scientifi-cally proven fact. If such a re-organization could beachieved, the threat of future war would be hugelydiminished.

The problem, of course, was that the ideal of nationalself-determination was unlikely to be accepted as auniversal principle because it challenged the ter-

Figure 6. An American map of the language geography of Europe, 1917. [Source: Dominian, L. 1917. Frontiers of Languageand Nationality in Europe. American Geographical Society, New York, USA.]


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Vol. 29, No. 3 223

ritorial integrity of virtually all states, not only theformer enemy states of Germany, Austria-Hungary,and the Ottoman Empire and the new pariah state ofBolshevik Russia but also the former allied empiresof Britain and France. Indeed, the American Civil

War had been waged precisely to crush those south-ern states that aspired to independent nationhood.The result was a selective imposition of national self-

determination in order to transfer territory from theformer enemy states either to newly independentstates in central and eastern Europe or to the alliedimperial states of Britain and France (Heffernan1998, pp. 113-19; see also Bowman 1921).

Although the hopes of the American delega-tion in Paris were quickly dashed, the casualty ofEuropean realpolitik and the mounting oppositionto Wilsonian internationalism in the United States,the story of the American Geographical Society andthe Inquiry provides a different perspective on therole of geographical knowledge in wartime. This wasnot an imperial archive in the British sense, still lesswas it a nationalist one in the French fashion. TheHouse Inquiry reflected more directly than eitherof these other two examples what Richards (1993)has called the fantasy of information, the myththat the acquisition and control of pure, objectiveknowledge was the ultimate route to power.

Conclusions

The foregoing analysis provides no more than aseries of vignettes on the politics of cartography inthe opening years of the twentieth century. There

are many questions that remain unanswered here. While this essay suggests how cartographic pro-duction can be interpreted in political terms, andhow maps themselves reflect particular historicalcircumstances, it remains extremely difficult toestablish precisely how, and to what extent, car-tography shaped or altered political attitudes. Thefact that governments and armed forces in thisperiod devoted so much time and energy to theproduction of new forms of cartography, beyondthe more fundamental forms of military and topo-graphical mapping, is at least indicative that mapswere perceived to have a much wider geopoliticalimportance, but much more detailed empiricalwork is needed on the political impact of specificmaps and mapping projects.

It should also be emphasized that the case studiesselected here merely hint at the complexities of therelationship between cartography and politics in thisperiod. Much more could be written about each ofthe maps and mapping projects described above, andthese stories could be extended, and modified, by

consideration of the political cartography producedin Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Japan andin a host of smaller countries as well. The inclusion ofmaterial from these different arenas would certainlymodify the story told above, but the larger argumenton which this story reststhat maps were intenselypolitical objects whose production, distribution, andreception were determined by, and may even have

shaped, political circumstanceis sufficiently simpleand robust (not to say self-evident) to be seen as agenerally valid observation, the nuances of whichcan and should be explored in other historical andgeographical contexts.

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